1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method for generating a mosaic image. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method for generating a mosaic image in an electronic device with a limited-capacity storage medium and computation capability.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mosaic images find their use in a variety of applications including advertisements, movies, and animations. For creating a mosaic image, non-photorealistic rendering is popular. The non-photorealistic rendering technique uses various objects taking the form of tiles, stored in a database. That is, an original image is divided into a plurality of areas and the divided areas are replaced with various objects in a tiling process, taking into account the correlation between the objects and the divided areas in terms of image characteristics such as colors, edges, and texture. The non-photorealistic rendering technique requires objects in shapes and sizes for application to the divided areas (i.e. mosaic blocks). Moreover, a database for storing the objects is also required.
Along with the recent proliferation of portable terminals such as mobile terminals, more and more people are conducting voice or data communications through portable terminals. As the portable terminal is viewed as a personalized device, it is added with diverse functions for acting as an MP3 player, a camera, a video player, an electronic dictionary, a game player, etc, thus serving as a multimedia device. Further, users want more functions for the portable terminal, for various uses. To meet the user's demand, portable terminal manufacturers have expended great amounts of effort to develop differentiated, versatile portable terminals. In this context, attempts are made to apply a conventional mosaic image generation method to a portable electronic device such as a mobile terminal.
A portable terminal like a mobile terminal is usually equipped with a limited-capacity memory as a database. Considering the environment of the portable terminal, that is, the limited-capacity memory, a small number of objects are stored in the memory and the conventional mosaic image generation method has been implemented using the objects. However, there are limitations in reflecting the characteristics of areas divided from an original image using limited resources (i.e. objects) and the resulting mosaic image is less complete. In addition, the use of the limited number of objects makes it difficult to expect a mosaic image that fully reflects a user's requirement.
Extraction of an object most approximate to a divided area of the original image in terms of characteristics takes a large volume of computation for the object search and comparison. Since a portable terminal with a lower computation capability takes a long time to extract such an object, its user is required to should wait a long time until a mosaic image is completed.